Saigon (90 page)

Trinh was still unconscious when Joseph took her from the Marine and carried her unsteadily across the darkened embassy compound to the landing zone on the lawn. He persuaded the colonel supervising the evacuation to let them board the last Sikorsky Sea Stallion, and he squeezed in among the seventy or so frightened Vietnamese who were already crowded inside. He had to crouch on the floor, cradling Trinh’s head against his chest, and as the helicopter rose and pulled slowly away from the glare of the embassy area, she opened her eyes and gazed around at the sea of faces in terror. 

“Don’t worry, Trinh,” he said, speaking close to her ear. “You’re safe — everything’s going to be all right.” 

While researching the background to this novel I received invaluable guidance from history scholars in Paris, London, Washington arid at Harvard University; a number of journalists and writers with a deep knowledge-of Vietnam also kindly shared their perceptions of the past with me. In Paris, my early enthusiasms were nourished by French historian Philippe Devillers and foreign correspondent Edith Lenart, who has covered Indochina with distinction for many years. In London Dr. Ralph B. Smith, Reader in the History of Southeast Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, steered me towards scores of stimulating sources, including the once-secret Süreté Générale files now accessible in the French Ministry of Colonies. In Washington, author William R. Corson, a splendid friend and a man of perhaps unrivaled military and intelligence experience in Southeast Asia, was an unfailing inspiration and helpmate; Professor Allan W. Cameron of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a specialist in the diplomatic history of Indochina, gave endless hours of his time to discussing Vietnam with me; Frank Snepp, author of Decent Interval, the inside story of Saigon’s final fall, provided many fresh insights; Douglas Pike, who has written several authoritative works on the Viet Cong, helped me generously and Bruce Martin, research facilities officer at the Library of Congress, constantly rendered assistance far beyond the call of duty. 

In libraries and archives in Paris, London and Washington over a three-year period I consulted several hundred books and thousands of documents relating to Vietnam; all contributed something to my efforts to re-create the Vietnam of decades past but among them a few books stood out as beacons of enlightenment. The Three Kingdoms of Indo-China by Harold J. Coolidge, Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1933, provided fascinating glimpses of what big game hunting was like in Cochin China and Annam in colonial times; Little China by Alan Houghton Brodrick, published in 1942, and East of Siam by American travel writer Harry A. Franck (1939) were indispensable guides to Vietnamese and colonial customs in the early years of this century. Ngo Vinh Long in his work Before the Revolution; The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French documented as nobody else has done the privations suffered by some of his countrymen on the rubber plantations and in the World War II famine, and Virginia Thompson’s wide-ranging survey French Indo-China (i937) brought the rigors and problems of life in the French colonial territories sharply into focus for me. Among the several biographies of 1-b Chi Minh, Charles Fenn’s, published in 1973, stood out because of its author’s personal contacts with the enigmatic Vietnamese leader during World War II. Little has been written about Britain’s brief but crucial involvement in Indochina in 1945 and George Rosie’s brave little paperback, The British in Vietnam is so far the sole published guide to those controversial events. Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dien Bien Phu and Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place were compelling reading for anyone wishing to reconstruct authentically the climactic battle of the French Indochina war. Of the books written during the 1960S David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire and Malcolm W. Browne’s The New Face of War proved invaluable guides to Saigon and South Vietnam in that period and Don Oberdorfer’s Tet! was an essential companion for understanding fully the historic Communist offensive of 1968. 

At a practical level my warmest thanks are also due to my research assistant in Washington, Sally Weston, to my typist Jean Johnson who tirelessly worked and reworked successive drafts of the novel in both London and Washington and ultimately to my tenacious editor in Boston, William D. Phillips. In acknowledging my debt of gratitude to those specialists who have aided me, I don’t, however, mean to suggest that they necessarily approve in every case of the manner in which I have portrayed the events of the past Fifty years. In the end the novelist’s viewpoint remains, uniquely, his own.